Auditory sensory storage in relation to the growth of sensation and acoustic information extraction

A brief, vivid phase of auditory sensory storage that outlasts the stimulus could be used in perception in two ways: First, all of the neural activity resulting from the stimulus, including that of the sensory store, could contribute to a sensation of growing loudness; second, the sensory store could permit the continued extraction of information about the sound's acoustic properties. This study includes a task for which these two processes lead to different predictions; a third prediction is based on the two processes combined. The task required loudness judgments for two brief tones presented with a variable intertone interval. The results of Experiments 1-3 were as one would expect if both the growth of sensation and information extraction contributed to the pattern of loudness judgments. Experiment 4 strengthened the two-process account by demonstrating the separability of the two processes. Approaches to mathematical modeling of these results are discussed.     

Temporal properties of memory for speech in preschool children

The ability of four-year-old children to remember syllables was investigated, both to determine the temporal properties of memory for speech in subjects who do not use sophisticated retention strategies, and to determine what speech memory is available in the late preschool period. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were to remember pairs of nonsense syllables for 5, 10, 15, or 20 sec filled with a silent, manual task. In both experiments there was an apparent decay of one type of speech memory across 10-15 sec. In Experiment 2, strong interference was obtained when there was a final speech suffix item. An additional phase of this experiment verified that children cannot rehearse during the postlist period. However, in Experiments 3 and 4, suffix effects were not obtained with adult subjects in similar tasks. The results suggest that memory for speech persists for at least 10 sec even in preschool children, but that adults, unlike preschool children, engage in an additional type of speech coding that increases the resistance of memory to speech interference.     

Mental rotation of possible and impossible four-cornered toruses

Possible and impossible four-cornered toruses were used as stimuli in a mental rotation paradigm. Rotation rates varied with number of “net changes in depth,” a variable that closely corresponds with ratings of impossibility, rather than with formal distinctions between the possible and the impossible. Rotation rates were also affected by perimeter shapes but not in accord with perimeter complexity as defined by number of vertices. Experiment 2 attempted to separate net changes in depth from figure symmetry and found symmetry to be the more reliable predictor of rotation rates, suggesting that symmetry may underlie the influence of net changes of depth.     

Visual working memory depends on attentional filtering

Working memory holds information actively being used in cognitive performance. Two important aspects of working memory are how many items it can hold, and how efficiently it can be used. Recently, Vogel and colleagues used event-related brain potentials to show that these two things are related. People who could remember more objects from a spatial array also more efficiently excluded irrelevant objects. The results raise important questions about what aspect of working memory is most fundamental.     

Can children provide coherent, stable, and valid self-reports on the big five dimensions? A longitudinal study from ages 5 to 7

Research on early childhood personality has been scarce. Self-reports of Big Five personality traits were measured longitudinally with the Berkeley Puppet Interview when children were 5, 6, and 7 years of age. For comparative purposes, Big Five self-reports were collected in a sample of college students. The children's self-reports showed levels of consistency and differentiation that approached those of the college age sample. Children's personality self-reports demonstrated significant correlations across the 1- and 2-year longitudinal intervals. Substantial and increasing convergence was found between children's self-reports of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness and conceptually relevant behavior ratings provided by mothers, fathers, and teachers. Children's self-reports of Neuroticism were unrelated to adults' reports but did predict sadness and anxious behavior observed in the laboratory. The results provide the beginnings of an account of how the Big Five dimensions begin to be salient and emerge as coherent, stable, and valid self-perceptions in childhood.     

When do visual and verbal memories conflict? The importance of working-memory load and retrieval

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel, 1997) combined with various verbal memory load conditions. Interference between tasks occurred if there was explicit retrieval of the verbal load during maintenance of a visual array. The effect was localized in the maintenance period of the visual task and was not the result of articulation per se. Interference also occurred when especially large silent verbal and visual loads were held concurrently. These results suggest central storage along with code-specific passive storage.     

Why does visual working memory ability improve with age: More objects,more feature detail,or both? A registered report

We investigated how visual working memory (WM) develops with age across the early elementary school period (6–7 years), early adolescence (11–13 years), and early adulthood (18–25 years). The work focuses on changes in two parameters: the number of objects retained at least in part, and the amount of feature-detail remembered for such objects. Some evidence suggests that, while infants can remember up to three objects, much like adults, young children only remember around two objects. This curious, nonmonotonic trajectory might be explained by differences in the level of feature-detail required for successful performance in infant versus child/adult memory paradigms. Here, we examined if changes in one of two parameters (the number of objects, and the amount of detail retained for each object) or both of them together can explain the development of visual WM ability as children grow older. To test it, we varied the amount of feature-detail participants need to retain. In the baseline condition, participants saw an array of objects and simply were to indicate whether an object was present in a probed location or not. This phase begun with a titration procedure to adjust each individual's array size to yield about 80% correct. In other conditions, we tested memory of not only location but also additional features of the objects (color, and sometimes also orientation). Our results suggest that capacity growth across ages is expressed by both improved location-memory (whether there was an object in a location) and feature completeness of object representations.     

The linear separability effect in color visual search: Ruling out the additive color hypothesis

Bauer, Jolicoeur, and Cowan (1996b, 1996c) demonstrated difficult visual search for color targets that were not linearly separable (in color space) from two distractor colors and easier search for linearly separable targets. This suggested that search is mediated by a chromatically linear discrimination mechanism (see D’Zmura, 1991). However, in those experiments, the targets that were not linearly separable fell midway between the distractor colors and thus corresponded to the admix of the distractor colors. An alternate interpretation of the results of Bauer et al. is that search was more difficult when the target corresponded to the distractor admix than when it did not. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments by contrasting conditions in which a target that was not linearly separable did or did not correspond to the admix of the distractor colors. In all cases, a target that was not linearly separable produced difficult search, demonstrating that linear separability determines search performance.